Earlier today we showed you Barack O'Bollywood and invited you to send in your favorite distracting and discomfiting viral videos about the Democratic candidates. Some of you did! We've embedded some of these videos after the jump. They make for disturbing viewing, you have been warned. There is musical theater and porn and ABBA.
Remember when we said this was the best amateur Obama YouTube music video ever? We were wrong. We apologize. This is the best one ever. It is insane. It was on boingboing, but don't hold that against it. It is awesome. Ron Paul may be the President of the Internet, but Barack Obama is a living meme.
Hillary Clinton strategist Harold Ickes and spokesman Phil Singer had breakfast with the Christian Science Monitor, David Broder, Maureen Dowd, Mark Sheilds, and other "eminences grises of the Washington Press Corps" yesterday, and the Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote up a nice little summary of the contentious event. The Clintons are not very happy with how the press has treated them, you see, and Phil Singer is especially angry. Singer is mad that the newsmedia listened to that silly Matt Drudge when he ran that silly photo of Barack Obama in a terrorist apron that (Drudge says) was sent to him by a still unknown Clinton staffer, and then they made a big issue of this photo, except they made, in Singer's mind, the wrong issue out of it, as they all sort of used it as proof that the Clinton campaign is grasping at straws. Singer, quite sincerely, expressed his regret that the newsmedia did not instead take their cue from last weekend's new Saturday Night Live, which was on balance rather nicer to Senator Clinton.
This was in Pennsylvania, but until the convention it could happen anywhere. The moral: Watch out for twitchy Hillary Clinton supporters. The Republicans did something terrible to them a long time ago and now they FIGHT TO WIN: "Shurelds, an Obama supporter, told Ortiz that the Illinois senator was 'trashing' Clinton. Ortiz, a Clinton supporter, replied that 'Obama was not a realist'... Ortiz, pictured in the mug shot below, was charged with a felony aggravated assault count and two misdemeanors and jailed in lieu of $20,000 bail. Shurelds was flown to Hahnemann University Hospital, where he was admitted in critical condition." [Smoking Gun]
Hillary Clinton's campaign is so outraged that people keep talking about the picture of Barack Hussein Obama in Somali dress, wearing a turban-ish hat and some kind of terrorist bomb-making apron type thing, that it has issued at least four different statements on the matter over the past 12 hours, mostly about how Obama should be "ashamed." Not about the clothing, of course, but for allowing a Clinton staffer to leak it, or something. Here's a fun clip of the gang in CNN's Situation Room slowly coming to the collective realization that Hillary knows exactly what she is doing with the Obama Turban thing — keeping the story alive:
Larry Sinclair, Barack Obama's alleged former gay sex partner, was paid $10,000 by WhiteHouse.com to take a polygraph test, which he failed. Turns out the weird ugly rambling toothless gentleman from YouTube might not be telling the whole truth when he claims he gave Obama a blowjob in 1999! We've been getting odd emails from internet crazy types with AOL email addresses touting Sinclair's claims since we first ran his video last month. The crazies were very excited for his polygraph test, and if he'd passed it, WhiteHouse.com promised him $100k. Related: Dear WhiteHouse.com, we had a kinky three-way with Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul at the Limelight in 1985. (Ron was gentle, Hillary selfish.) Bonus nutty email attached.
A photo of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama wearing sort of an apron-looking thing and a funny turban? A Hillary Clinton staffer asks (according to Drudge): "Wouldn't we be seeing this on the cover of every magazine if it were HRC?" Uh, sure. Sure we would. The photo, from 2006, shows Obama "fitted as a Somali Elder, during his visit to Wajir, a rural area in northeastern Kenya." It was sent around by Clinton's press office (once again, according to Drudge) this weekend, in an apparent attempt to prove that the Illinois Senator is a Muslim terrorist who wears a dress. Mischievous Matt Drudge gave the story an amusing anti-Clinton spin. Because his relationship with her is complicated.
Did you watch the Clinton/Obama debate last night? We didn't! But apparently it went like this: Hillary was all "Obama is a plagiarist hope you can Xerox lol" and the crowd sorta booed but the media decided it was the best zinger ever and Obama was ok but no zingers at all! And Hillary had a rousing and inspiring closing speech that she totally plagiarized from "Lonesome" John Edwards as the following YouTube clip clearly shows.
George Clooney has declared himself the Hillary Clinton of the Oscars in one of the smartest swipes ever taken at the Democratic presidential candidate. Clooney is a huge, huge Barack Obama fan, having called him "the best candidate I've ever seen" and basically declaring he should be president from now until eternity. And he recently got a huge platform to bolster the candidate as the cover boy on the Mar. 3 issue of Time, which included a Sam Jones photo spread and a feature article from Joel Stein, who had Clooney over for dinner. But of course Time doesn't care much about movie megastar Clooney's political punditry, so he had to sneak in his attack as part of an roundup of his Oscar picks, in which he declared he will lose his shot at the Best Actor Oscar, just like a certain loser politician will lose her shot at Best Democrat In A Leading Role. Clooney's exact words, plus bonus video of the actor at Stein's house, after the jump.
We've completely forgotten the grating, chintzy, and pandering tones of the Obama Girl and will.i.am thanks to the very first entertaining musical salute to a candidate in the history of YouTube. It's called Viva Obama, and it's a catchy tune that will have you humming "Viva Obama! (Viva!) Familias unidas, seguras y hasta con plan de salud!" in no time. Sorry, Hill, your miniature Mexican stereotype is no match for an entire mariachi band. Video after the jump, crank up the volume.
All the parts of the internet that care about such matters have been speculating as to what Saturday Night Live will do about Barack Obama. They don't really have anyone qualified to impersonate him right now, especially as blackface is more or less out of style. A couple sites have reported rumors that sketch comedian and comedy writer (and thin black man) Donald Glover will join the cast, possibly even this weekend, in order to ensure that the Democratic hopeful will be properly parodied. Comedy Central's Insider blog has the story and the Chicago Sun-Times thinks it's a done deal. But! We went to school with Donald! He, like us, was in NYU's Dramatic Writing program. So we checked Facebook and learned, direct from Donald, that all of this speculation is unfounded. Donald auditioned, but hasn't been asked to join the cast. His wall message (of hope) is attached, click to enlarge.
Seeing as we could very well have a black president soon, curious patriots are tilling through the earth of our history, trying to divine some clues from the past as to what that could mean for America. We, on the other hand, just Googled "black presidents in movies." The Onion recently ran one of their jokey-jokey op eds on the subject, and NPR even covered it over a a year ago. What lessons can we learn from our celluloid brothers-in-chief? What can we expect when we're expecting a black president?
HARDBALL with Chris Matthews pulled the ol' Osama/Obama mix-up last night. In an onscreen graphic, no less! Verbal slips are one thing, but how the hell does this make it from the graphics department to the air without anyone noticing? Is poor Chris the only person running the show? Clip below.
Newsweek put hope-monger's wife Michelle Obama on the cover this week, and they offer a lengthy interview and story that remind us all how Ms. Obama is very smart and outspoken, and also pretty sarcastic. In fact the cover story is basically identical to recent profiles in both the Times and the Wall Street Journal! But obviously there's a lengthy lead time for the newsweeklies, and hey, there are only so many ways to call a woman "sarcastic." This many ways:
For about 25 seconds in Wisconsin, Barack Obama spoke some lines pretty much identical to those spoken in 2006 by his friend Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts. The lines were about the power of words in speeches and documents, about how words have more power than they are often given credit for. Of course, now the Obama campaign is saying no one should care too much about these particular words, or whether Obama really wrote them, since everything is OK with Patrick. This is disingenuous, and some people are very worked up about it. But it's 25 seconds — a fraction of a fraction of a speech. Sounds a lot more like Adam Gopnik borrowing the concept of "verticality" from Mike Huckabee for one of his twee New Yorker pieces than, say, that one-day New York Press sex columnist who copied Dan Savage wholesale, or Kaavya Viswanathan at Harvard, repeatedly copying passages from real author Megan McCafferty for her debut novel. Compare the Obama and Patrick speeches for yourself, after the jump.
